USA Today–Bestselling Author: She’s not royal material—yet he can’t resist her . . . “Lucy Monroe’s romances sizzle.” —JoAnn Ross, New York Times–bestselling author of The Inheritance Sheikh Amir bin Faruq al Zorha lives in New York, but the desert is where his heart lies. Now it’s time for him to marry. . . . Grace Brown, Amir’s plain but indispensable assistant, isn’t exactly queen material. No matter how tempted Amir is to take her innocence, she’s off-limits. Until he returns to his homeland, where the barbarian prince replaces the businessman—and resolves that Grace will be his!

Grace Brown had always been the perfect secretary for Sheikh Amir, she could do anything…except find him a bride. She has for the longest time been in love with him and had to suffer while watching him go through girlfriends and even an arranged marriage. After the arranged marriage was cancelled, Grace thought her heart would stop aching. But now she is forced to find the man she loves someone to marry out of convenience. For Amir, he seemed to always act like a playboy prince. When actually, he was just finding a substitute for Grace. He doubted his feelings at first but once he understood what he felt for her, Amir knew he couldn’t tell Grace for fear of losing her. These two find themselves in quite a predicament. Will Grace and Amir take action?

One convenient download. One bargain price. Get all August Harlequin Presents with one click! All the drama and passion you could ever hope for can be found in the pages of these compelling novels from Harlequin Presents. A playboy sheikh discovers a new side to his devoted, plain-Jane assistant. A beautiful widow falls for her late husband's double. A dreamy waitress's fantasies about a Greek tycoon get her into lots of hot water. A bitter billionaire blackmails the ravishing manager of his hotel with an indecent proposal. And that's just the beginning! Prepare to be moved, thrilled, and swept away to lavish locales in eight emotionally charged, sizzling tales of romance and desire, yours with one simple click of the mouse. Bundle inclues: Hired: The Sheikh's Secretary Mistress by Lucy Monroe, The Millionaire's Inexperienced Love-Slave by Miranda Lee, Bought: The Greek's Innocent Virgin by Sarah Morgan, At the Sicilian Count's Command by Carole Mortimer, The Italian Boss's Mistress of Revenge by Trish Morey, Caretti's Forced Bride by Jennie Lucas, One Night, One Baby by Kate Hardy, and Taken by the Maverick Millionaire by Anna Cleary.

The wealthy head of a security company gets a second chance with a beautiful princess in this classic contemporary romance by a USA Today bestseller. Sebastian Hawk is a master in business and in the bedroom. There is no place for emotion in his world. Lina is a headstrong and reckless princess in need of protection, and Sebastian is called in to provide round-the-clock security. Her provocative innocence is too enticing, and Sebastian loses his legendary self-control and beds her . . . only to discover she’s still a virgin. . . . Originally published in 2007.

Anna’s facing the fear of her marriage coming apart at the seems because she realizes she will probably never be able to give her tycoon husband the children his very traditional Greek family so clearly expects. She’s shattered at the prospect of losing him, but won’t cling to a marriage doomed by her failure to be the woman he needs. Loukas’s desire for Anna has only grown over the brief years of their marriage and he can’t understand why she’s pulling away from him right now. Will this Greek tycoon let his greatest treasure go?

The Sheik—E. M. Hull’s best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino—kindled “sheik fever” across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically “Oriental” swept through fashion, film, and literature, spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided, tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today’s mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments. Drawing on “high” literature, erotica, and popular romance fiction and films, Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion, abduction by Barbary pirates, sexual slavery, the fear of renegades, the Oriental despot and his harem, the figure of the powerful Western concubine, and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism, decolonization, sexual liberation, feminism, and American involvement in the Middle East on women’s Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers, consumers, and imagined actors; and revised, reversed, or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.

Since the 1970s, romance novels have surpassed all other genres in terms of popularity in the United States, accounting for half of all mass market paperbacks sold and driving the digital publishing revolution. Romance Fiction and American Culture brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and publishing to explore American romance fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Essays on interracial, inspirational, and LGBTQ romance attend to the diversity of the genre, while new areas of inquiry are suggested in contextual and interdisciplinary examinations of romance authorship, readership, and publishing history, of pleasure and respectability in African American romance fiction, and of the dynamic tension between the genre and second wave feminism. As it situates romance fiction among other instances of American love culture, from Civil War diaries to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Romance Fiction and American Culture confirms the complexity and enduring importance of this most contested of genres.